


Common Ground

by binz, shiplizard



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Adorable Grogu | Baby Yoda, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ancient Enemies to Best Friends (With Benefits), Ancient Enemies to Co-Parents, Canon Is Fake Unless I Like It, Din Doesn’t Know Shit About Fuck, Doing Their Best, Good Parent Din Djarin, Gratuitous Mando’a, Himbolorian, Himbos in space, Luke Doesn’t Know Fuck About Shit, Luke Skytwinkle, M/M, Making An Ass Out Of Ump And Tions, Shared Burdens, Too Gay And Horny To Be A Bromance, in no way is Luke an archeologist, not really a romance, sorry space archeologists, the weight of history
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-13 01:40:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29893701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/binz/pseuds/binz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiplizard/pseuds/shiplizard
Summary: Luke’s impressions of Grogu’s father were quick and violent; an emptied light cruiser, a gleam of armour, and a display of raw, selfless love. He wants to know this deadly but gentle man from Grogu’s memories much better.But what impression did he leave in return? And what does the Mandalorian want from him? They may have more in common than they realize.
Relationships: Din Djarin & Grogu | Baby Yoda, Din Djarin & Luke Skywalker, Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker, Grogu | Baby Yoda & Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker
Comments: 43
Kudos: 112





	Common Ground

**Author's Note:**

> Started as a fic about two bottoms flirting, became feelings. 
> 
> Hovertext and endnotes for Mando’a translations.

The sun is setting when Luke is finally able to step out of the little pop-up field shelter they’ve been living in, the evening wind rattling the bottom of the shelter door where the magnets aren’t sealing properly to the stabilizer pad below, and blowing his hair in his eyes and purple-shaded clouds across the pink and orange sky. 

It’s beautiful, like Yavin 4 so often is, full of colours so rich that even his memories of Tatooine are faded and washed out in comparison. Maybe another night he would have stopped to admire it, would have called Grogu over and sat them together on their mountain slope to listen to the low sounds of roosting whisper birds calling each other home, and he could have pointed out the just-there shadows of the small village in the distance where it was tucked into the barely visible break in the rainforest below, or the smudge of the moon’s dark ocean beyond--

But not tonight. No, the thought of it is almost painful. Grogu is finally, _finally_ sleeping, after hours of fretting and fussy misery, and Luke barely risks thinking about the child awake in case it’s enough to rouse him. 

Luke’s worn down to an ache, torn between the opportunity to use the moments of quiet to focus on his research, or just giving in to sleep for as long as he can. But-- before anything else, he has to check in on the search. 

He realizes, one waiting chirp of Leia’s communicator too late, that he should have checked what time it was in Hanna City before he placed the call.

“Luke?” says Leia’s voice out of his communicator, and he knows instantly that she’d been sleeping. 

“Sorry,” he says.

“ _It’s three in the damn morning_ ,” says Han’s voice, farther away and muffled, and Leia’s “I know, go back to sleep,” isn’t directed at him, but the sighed: “This isn’t an emergency call, I take it?” is.

“No-- blast it. I forgot to check the time again. Sorry, Leia.”

“It’s fine. One day you’ll remember and then I’ll know something really is wrong.” He hears a shuffle, a door sealing shut and some keys being depressed, and then the voice-only switches over to holo-com, showing him Leia’s tired face and lopsided smile, her chin resting on one fist and her long hair loosely braided for sleep. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks,” he says, and can’t help the laugh that follows, a bubble of delight rising up because he really is always so glad to see her. “Grogu hasn’t wanted to sleep today.” Or yesterday. Or the day before. “He misses his father.” 

Leia nods and politely doesn’t remind him that she has a five year old and knows perfectly well what an upset toddler is like, or that every piece of bantha turd he’s stepped in and is spreading around is of his own making. He knows already.

“He’s been through a lot,” Luke adds. “Some days are worse than others.”

Leia sighs, and he sees her holo-image’s eyes flick up and down and hears more keys being depressed while her holo under and over staturates in what must be the changing light of her computer terminal. She shakes her head. “No new activity’s been logged since the last time,” she says, her focus firming back on him. “This Mandalorian knows how to disappear. No surprise there.” 

Luke bites back a groan, settling for squeezing his eyes shut instead. He’d hoped-- it had been over a standard day since his last call, surely someone somewhere had seen something, heard something. How could one man completely fall off the face of the galaxy after helping a New Republic marshal bring in a notorious war criminal? 

Luke might not know anything more about Mandalorians than the exasperated summary Leia had given him, after he’d called to let her know about his new student and how Grogu had come into his care, but even if they were, as a people, ‘exceptionally skilled at living in secrecy', Luke was pretty sure this Mandalorian was the kind of man you’d notice, even if you didn’t know how rare the material of his armour was. 

Luke, for example, noticed him just fine and he’d never heard of whatever the stuff was. He’d noticed that it was good quality steel and it didn’t take a carbon score from a blaster (or that somehow, unlike everyone else on the bridge the ship itself, the man wearing it had managed to completely avoid blasterfire). Obviously very nice stuff, but he hadn’t realized it was in such limited supply.

(All of it? Leia had said. All of his armour? And the whole spear, not just the blade?

Han had been muttering to himself and carrying numbers on his fingers. Whatever his conclusion, he'd gone pale and had to sit down.) 

He rubs a finger between his eyes, still shut, trying to visualize time and the galaxy at once, tries to chart what he knows of Grogu’s father in both. A headache twangs at his temples. He asks, just to confirm, because he almost, _almost_ thinks there’s something there, something he just can’t quite make out the importance of-- “Last known sighting before this was Nevarro, right? I’m sure there has to be something more to that planet.”

“No,” says Leia, and he blinks his eyes open, finding hers in the holo-image. “Tatooine, Mos Pelgo. Remember?”

“For real? You’re counting that? Are you sure that isn’t a hoax?”

Leia frowns, skimming a report only she can see. “The officer who reported it didn’t seem to think so.”

“But-- really? A big krayt. An _actual krayt dragon_.” It’s absurd, comically so. But... he wants to believe it, he truly does, so much that he’s wary of just how eagerly his imagination is reaching out after the idea. “And we’re sure it was him? Grogu’s father?”

“A Mandalorian in unpainted armour with a small green child, approximately nine standard months ago.” She lifts a shoulder. “It could have been a different Mandalorian, but that seems unlikely, doesn’t it?”

The whole thing seems unlikely. Improbably so. But the timeline is almost four months after the next most recently reported sighting, on Nevarro (engaging a TIE fighter, mid-air, without a ship of his own, with his _hands_ \-- Luke isn’t sure any of the reports are real) and they need everything they can get if they’re going to find Grogu’s father. “And it wasn’t a canyon krayt, you’re sure? I thought Han was pulling my leg. Making fun of me because I don’t know the price of bespar steel.” 

“Beskar,” Leia says, tired enough to sound openly despairing about her brother’s naivete. 

That’s rich! Coming from someone who doesn’t appreciate the difference between an animal the size of a small house and one the size of a small town, part of him scoffs. He quiets it. It’s an unfair part of him. 

Most days his life on Tatooine feels like someone else lived it, in the long ago past: then, without warning, it’ll be right there, reminding him that not everyone lives under two suns in a sea of sand. There are parts of the universe that go ignored, and he grew up in one of them. 

If the marshal of Mos Pelgo is telling the truth (and Luke had always thought that place was an old duners-tale, so that was already something), Grogu’s father helped kill a greater krayt dragon, while brokering a peace accord between a band of Tusken Raiders and the marshal’s mining town in the process, and Leia and Han don’t understand why both of those things seem impossible. Leia thinks it sounds like a simple case of coming to an agreement to solve a mutual problem. Sure. But first you’d need to start with the Tuskens ‘agreeing’ that offworlders ever had a right to settle on Tatooine-- then move on to the ‘mutual problem’ of finding a way to take down a full-grown greater krayt using anything less than a heavily armed land cruiser with mounted proton cannons.

He’d say the whole thing is unimaginable, but he spent a lot of time imagining things like that, back on the moisture farm. He daydreamed about men like Grogu’s father, who’d sweep into his life like a sandstorm and pull him away to adventure. Men who could do the impossible. Men strong as a dewback and fierce as the desert wind, but gentle enough to handle a grateful, starstruck farmboy.... 

He runs his left hand down his face. 

He’s looking for the man because Grogu needs his father, not because of whatever daydreams he used to indulge in, and it won’t do anyone any favours for him to start dusting off those old daydreams now. 

It was his mistake that he didn’t leave a way to get in contact-- he’d realized the second he set foot on the bridge of what was undoubtedly an Empire ship in front of an Imperial war criminal, apparently incapacitated or not, that he had to watch what he said, but he should have given the man a private channel to call. He’d been uneasy-- there’d been more than a dozen of those new Dark Troopers, and the call of the child was so faint he’d feared the worst. He’d acted too fast. 

He wasn’t expecting the guy to disappear so thoroughly, though! 

“I wish I had different news, Luke,” Leia says. “But Mandalorians are experts at not being found-- they’ve had to be. If nothing more recent is reported today, I’ll try Marshal Dune myself. She’s had a while to think; maybe she can come up with something we haven’t. And either way she might at least be able to help us understand what happened on Nevarro last year-- Imperial remnants taking over an entire planet and we didn’t even notice...” she cuts off with an enraged huff.

He doesn’t have to force a smile, a wave of gratitude washing through him. Leia really is doing everything she can for him, even when it was his own carelessness that got him into this mess. “Thanks, Leia,” he says, and means it so much. “Really. I’m sorry for waking you. Have a good night.”

“Get some sleep, Luke,” she says, and her holo-image cuts out on her tired half-smile.

The sky’s gone dark when he refocuses his gaze on the horizon, indigo rising up to black and the light of millions of distant stars peeking in and out between drifting clouds, and he takes a moment to breathe in-- out-- and rebalance. No matter how good one Mandalorian might be at disappearing, he has the reach of the New Republic at his back, and more importantly, he has Leia. And they are going to find this man, and he is going to bring him to his son, and he is going to apologize profusely for the misunderstanding. 

...And then he’s going to ask if he _really_ killed a krayt dragon.

* * *

  


It rained overnight, heavily enough to soak into the ground and turn what had previously been dry, chalky dirt into a sticky slurry, and what had previously been a fairly simple task of unearthing broken bits of temple stones into a downright mess. Luke shoves at his face with the back of his forearm, wincing at the mud he can feel smearing into his hair, and finally manages to haul a chunk of stone the size of his head out of the wet, mucky pit that’s forming around his ankles. 

Artoo had taken one roll out of the shelter door, reversed, and firmly stated his verdict to remain inside. Luke didn’t blame him-- it had been over a year before he’d stopped finding traces of Dagoban slime in the droid’s circuitry, no matter how many times he cleaned him.

Grogu, on the other hand, had enjoyed the rain, his dark eyes bright and curious at the sound of it drumming against the shelter when they awoke, fading away as they prepared for the day. He charged out the second breakfast was done to play in the drizzly ends of it, pattering about in the puddles that had collected on their slope, his tiny feet splashing mud clear up the length of his robe. The muck and mess were more than worth it, for the sense of joy that had come from the child then, after so many days of mounting anxiety and fear. 

They’d meditated in a rare morning fog-- not often that it made its way up their mountain from the forest below without burning off. Grogu had adored it; he had settled down easily amidst the wisps of it, little three-fingered hands reaching out. His thoughts had brushed against Luke’s with mirage glimpses of happy memories of playing with other children in the mud on another forested world, chasing small, darting fish and amphibians in humid wetlands, and being held safe in his father’s arms, all without a trace of the child’s fear or the long, unhappy dark that split his life in two.

It had led to a productive training session, Grogu smoothly accepting and handing back control of the stone they had levitated between them while the sun climbed in the sky. It was a balancing act that was harder than handling it alone, trading the responsibility to keep it suspended and direct the Force where it flowed around the stone and between them. 

The stone had barely trembled in the air until the end, Grogu weary and clumsy on the final return. And even then, it had been the strain of so finely manipulating the Force that had eventually worn the child out and sent his presence drooping and flickering, and not the fear that was carried so close to his skin-- _of discovery, of what would happen after, and such long, long darkness_ \-- or the soft, sharp heartache that ran beneath it. 

Luke’s glad to see those memories of darkness are so faded. That fear was so deep, for a child so young. Grogu could shutter his presence from the Force so expertly that grief had winded Luke the first time he’d felt it happen.

Now, Grogu is sleeping on Luke’s abandoned tunic in the shade of a pile of equipment at what passes for the dig’s field center, his presence a lulled, contented weight at the back of Luke’s awareness, and Luke is rolling around in the mud trying to dig up broken pieces of history. 

Grogu... _was_ sleeping. Luke stops-- grimaces, and already knows the answer before he turns to check. Gone. He really should know better by now. He hasn’t heard a quiet, snuffling snore for almost five minutes. 

“Grogu?” he says, stepping up out of his dig pit with a squelch. “Grogu? Where’d you go?”

He hears the gurgling chuckles almost immediately, and the slapping of little feet in the mud, and follows them a few steps from the nap spot to where Grogu has found a puddle of runoff water trickling from down the rounded mountain peak. It’s shallow, soaking just the hem of the child’s long, muddy robes, but almost two meters wide and, it seems, the best thing in the galaxy for someone small and green and partial to mud. 

“What are you up to over here?” Luke says, already laughing at the squinched eyes and open-mouthed smile and the muddy water dripping from Grogu’s ears. “This is a pretty big puddle!”

Grogu trills in pleased agreement--

\--then lunges, and has a spined puc hanging from his mouth before Luke even knows the frog is there. It’s long legs kick at the air and Grogu tips his head back to swallow it-- but the tough skin must be giving him trouble, or the tough skin combined with the puc’s size, too large to look at all comfortable in the child’s mouth, because he chews ferociously but not much happens. An unhappy whine starts in his throat.

“Grogu, Grogu, no, put that down.” Luke hurries over, crouching down beside the puddle, his arms outstretched toward the child. “Don’t eat that, okay-- that’s not food, that’s not food.”

Grogu whines again, head coming back down, and stares at him. The puc’s webbed feet slap against Grogu’s muddy robes and face. “The spines are giving you trouble, aren’t they,” Luke says sympathetically, gesturing Grogu forward encouragingly. “Yeah, that’s what they’re there for. Spit that out, okay? You must be hungry. Come with me and I’ll get us something better.”

Grogu holds his gaze, considering, and Luke is fairly sure he’s going to try to just swallow the thing whole anyway, before he lets the puc fall from his mouth. It hits the puddle with a wet slap, hopping away in a furious scramble.

“Good job, buddy!” Luke says, and scoops Grogu up when he raises his arms. 

The memories that come through with the touch are startling, the clarity unexpected-- Luke clutches Grogu against his chest and steps sideways into the puddle instead of backwards and away, head spinning at the glimpses of a life not his own. 

_\-- more types of amphibians in Grogu’s little mouth than Luke had ever wanted to know existed, never mind feel and taste and --_

_\-- sensations and moments that are fragmented and overlapping, the tastes and textures of fabric, and brick, metal and wood and stone, the crunching and popping of eggs and tickling movements of wriggling creatures, and an undercurrent of woven curiosity and hunger and joy and playfulness and --_

_\-- a voice, over and over, trusted and fond, sometimes speaking Basic, sometimes speaking a language Luke doesn’t know, but recalled with so much love that Luke would know the speaker was Grogu’s father even if he didn’t recognize his voice from the light cruiser: “spit that out” “nayc; nu skaar” “ke te'hab’ibac” “that’s good” "jate, jate" \--_

This isn’t the first time he and Grogu have shared their thoughts. All he knows of the child comes from shared memories and impressions, but those had all been either deliberately exchanged or hazy suggestions plucked from the Force, or, in the worst moments, desperate cries of pure emotion and need. Nothing like this open transference, all automatic, given generously and almost accidental--

Luke’s chest opens up; the air he sucks in feels like it’s full of light when he realizes the trust that Grogu has just shown him. For the child’s mental barriers to be so low, when Luke knows just how incredibly strong, how persistently present they can be... he laughs, bouncing Grogu in his arms on the short walk back to their pop-up shelter. “All right, secondmeal time. Let’s get some lunch!”

**Author's Note:**

> **Mando’a Translations**
> 
> _jate_ \- good  
>  _ke te'hab’ibac_ \- spit that out  
>  _nayc_ \- no  
>  _nu skaar_ \- not food


End file.
